Can anyone bring back St. Johns resident Lue Yang?

In our country’s zeal to eradicate our population of drug-running gangbangers who create mischief here since entering the United States illegally, authorities have unnecessarily caught a St. Johns resident in the dragnet.

A 47-year-old married factory worker, who has been raising six kids with his wife of 20-some years, left home for work one day this summer and didn’t return.

Authorities have since detained him like a hardened criminal — sleeping on concrete floors, eating poorly and living with, well, drug-runners and gangbangers in a “processing center” in Pine Prairie, Louisiana.

His name is Lue Yang.

He came to the United States as a toddler, the son of Hmong refugees. His father, like many others, served with the United States forces during the Vietnam War.

After the war, Yang’s dad, like other Hmongs, fled to Laos to avoid political persecution from the Communists. He and his mother ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand, and he was born “stateless” or without a home.

In the 1970s, the Yangs were allowed to legally settle in the United States as a thank you for Yang’s dad’s support of the U.S. military.

The family ended up in mid-Michigan. 

In 1997, Yang, at age 18, made a bad decision and sat in a vehicle while some acquaintances took part in a home invasion. He didn’t report the incident to authorities, but when police cracked the case, they busted him with everyone else.

Yang served 10 months in jail as punishment. From there, he led, by all accounts, an upstanding life. He got married to Ann Vue, and the two are raising six children in St. Johns. He volunteers. He has a full-time job at a Lansing-area manufacturing plant. He helps take care of his elderly mother.

Although Yang tried to become a U.S. citizen, they had to expunge the old charge from his record first. They finally did so in 2018, allowing him to begin the application process.

The financial cost of citizenship can be prohibitive, however. Yang kept putting it off until he had several thousand dollars in expendable income to do it. The goal was to get it done this year or next.

On July 15, his life changed forever when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked him up at his work and started the process of deportation. In the eyes of the federal government, Yang was an immigrant with a criminal record. In the black-and-white reading of the president’s directive, Yang had to go.

But where?

Yang was born stateless. Thailand doesn’t want him. He was born in a refugee camp there, but his parents were not residents. In Laos, the Hmong people are an oft-persecuted ethnic minority, so he’d face a rocky reception there even if he’s allowed to return. 

It’s the same situation in Vietnam, except his father fought against the government, so he theoretically could be arrested and executed if he returns there. That’s the fear, anyway.

But getting tangled up in the logistical challenge of where to send him is aside from the point, though, isn’t it?

Does Yang really need to be sent anywhere at all, but back home to St. Johns?

It would appear he’s simply a number that the administration can count as part of a broader political statement about how they’re making our communities safer because ICE is snatching up non-citizens with criminal records.

But nobody is made safer because Yang is in some detention facility in Louisiana. Instead, a local family is devastated. A wife is without her husband. Children are without their father. 

A GoFundMe account is hardly keeping the family afloat financially while Vue works with attorneys and elected officeholders in her desperate attempt to get Yang back to St. Johns.

She’s drawing hope from the knowledge that federal immigration officials have been known, in limited cases, to reverse course once they start the gears churning on someone.

Will they do it for Lue? Can the governor help? Our congressional delegation? Our U.S. senators? Three months after the fact, it’s still, sadly, an open question.

Can anyone bring back Lue Yang?(Kyle Melinn is the editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. You can email him at melinnky@gmail.com.)